Study on Johnson

Jonson is another important area of study under this rubric, though he was not a favourite of new criticism but theorists are deserving the credit for recovering sympathetically the urgencies of his "social verse".

In this study we need to note a noble biography written by David Riggs; in the biography the psychoanalytical passages are cheerful work indeed, they are about a renaissance figure which shows Riggs's interest in seeing historical aspects.

Don E. Wayne's, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History is a good example of seventeenth century studies. In this book Wayne makes an interesting point about the semiotics of place and architecture. Wayne's interpretation is showing Jonson's attitude towards aristocracy, pointing towards the bourgeois notion of virtuous dwelling. Wayne's above-mentioned book can be compared with Fish's fine article, "Authors-readers; Jonson's community of the same". Both critics note the monumental abstractness of Jonson's definitions of virtue; both are agreed with Jonson's definition that Jonson is using real people and real places to furnish an imaginary community with imaginary values.

Annabel Patterson's, Censorship and Interpretation, The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, ranges from Sidney to, Jean Jacques Rousseau, is an important book on seventeenth century studies. Her book developed the thesis that literature evolves dialectically with the pressure of state censorship. She defines power as not impersonal and imageless but the policies of individuals with their self-interested axes to grind. This book talks about topical allusion and the effort of the authors of that age to distort the effect of censorship. Patterson's book is trying to create political sensation in reader's mind, which can be taken as the evidences of the political scenario of seventeenth century.